Tuesday, 19 February 2008

The Island at the Top of the World (1974)

1974's The Island at the Top of the World starring David Hartman, Donald Sniden, and Mako as the Inuit Oomiak, was part of a mid-late 1970's revival of period films that also included the Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptations At the Earth's Core, The Land that Time Forgot and its sequel The People that Time Forgot, and it featured a fairly standard "lost world" story where explorers go to the arctic and find a hidden, thermally warmed oasis. This time, however, instead of dinosaurs or Ice Age mammals, the explorers find a lost colony of vikings held over from the age of the great sagas.

Based on Ian Cameron's novel The Lost Ones, this central twist of a preserved Norse culture offers an interesting outing that is never fully capitalized on. While preserved, this culture has also developed uniquely over the past thousand years, and we catch too brief a glimpse at this in setting up the "Man Against Man" portion of the story. Having been isolated in this volcanic valley for a thousand years, the vikings have written their own saga about the rest of the world being an icy wasteland, prophesying that some day barbarians would come and try to invade the valley. It isn't too difficult to figure out who those "barbarians" are. Unfortunately, this glimpse at their culture is relegated to a set-up for the conflict between the explorers and the Norse, fueled by the fervor of the viking shaman in a rather uninspired episode of blaming everything on religious intolerance once again.

The "Man Against Nature" part of the program is primarily reserved for the fantastic airship Hyperion. The token piece of fantastic technology is actually a rather nicely designed hydrogen airship, and easily holds its own alongside other film designs, including Disney's own Nautilus. The Hyperion scenes are among the most stirring of the film: while the special effects leave a lot to be desired, the miniature diorama work with the airship is quite remarkable, offering an incredible vision of arctic wastes and montane peaks.

One thing the movie very consciously attempts to convey is the sense of sheer size. This is as true of the scenes with living actors as it is with those of the Hyperion ship. Everything on the Island is immense, from the mountains and the passes between them to the great temples and the statues inside them built by the vikings. The matte work is quite well done and gives a definite impression of the sublime, which is that greatness of scale that dwarfs the sense of self in comparison to Time, Space, Nature and Divinity. Even some of the most contrived aspects of Island, like the heretofore unknown "Whales Graveyard" (a transparent take off on the myth of the Elephant's Graveyard which motivates, amongst other films, the 1932 Tarzan the Ape Man), are infused with this sensibility.

An admirable effort on the part of Disney's stalwart director Robert Stevenson and his writers was to remain true to linguistic and cultural characteristics of the characters involved. The primary example of this are the vikings themselves, none of whom are made to speak English save the one who was actually taught English by a shipwrecked whaler. Nor is the viewer even treated to subtitles, relying instead upon the characters to translate for us, and suffering their same uncertainty when we can read only expressions and body language.

However, not all is credible in Island. In a film that demands the suspension of disbelief when it comes to such fantastic elements as airships and lost colonies of vikings, leave it to the relatively mundane to cause some mental stumbling. In this case, it was the incredibly unrealistic portrayal of the rigors of the arctic. Tales of human survival in the polar regions are quite satisfying on their own, as anyone who has read Jack London or followed the Shackleton Expedition can attest to. The power of nature itself is highly dramatic, as seen in Disney's 1958 True Life Adventure, White Wilderness. But Island circumvents this by treating the arctic like a pleasant winter outing, as characters survive in flimsy winter coats and dive in and out of the North Pole's waters with nary a chilled breath or lost foot.

In any event, The Island at the Top of the World has become a forgotten Disney film, probably of no interest to anyone but fans of Scientific Romances and 20,000 Leagues. It did receive one special accolade however: the French-built Hyperion served the purposes of Disneyland Paris' Jules Verne-themed Discoveryland so well that a full scale model of it acts as the entrance for the Cafè Hyperion eatery.

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Voyages Extraordinaires is a weblog for people of intelligence and good breeding who enjoy rousing Victorian-Edwardian Scientific, Imperial and Planetary Romances, Retro-Futurism, Victoriana, silent and early cinema, and authentic tales of history and exploration.

"The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful it would not be worth knowing, and life would not be worth living."~ Jules Henri Poincaré

"Isn't it splendid to think of all the things there are to find out about? It just makes me feel glad to be alive-- it's such an interesting world. It wouldn't be half so interesting if we know all about everything, would it? There'd be no scope for imagination then, would there?"~ Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

"Tom said we was right in the midst of the Arabian Nights now. He said it was right along here that one of the cutest things in that book happened; so we looked down and watched while he told about it, because there ain't anything that is so interesting to look at as a place that a book has talked about."
~Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer Abroad

"One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye."
~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

"We were not pioneers ourselves, but we journeyed over old trails that were new to us, and with hearts open. Who shall distinguish?"
~ J. Monroe Thorington, The Glittering Mountains of Canada

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Jules Verne

"My object has been to depict the earth, and not the earth alone, but the universe, for I have sometimes taken my readers away from earth, in the novel. And I have tried at the same time to realize a very high ideal of beauty of style. It is said that there can’t be any style in a novel of adventure, but it isn’t true..."

Jules Hetzel, Jules Verne's Publisher

"to outline all the geographical, geological, physical, and astronomical knowledge amassed by modern science and to recount, in an entertaining and picturesque format...the history of the universe."